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Abstract

Transmitting quantum information across quantum channels is an important task. However quantum information is delicate, and is easily corrupted. We address the task of protecting quantum information from an information theoretic perspective -- we encode some message qudits into a quantum code, send the encoded quantum information across the noisy quantum channel, then recover the message qudits by decoding. In this dissertation, we discuss the coding problem from several perspectives.}
The noisy quantum channel is one of the central aspects of the quantum coding problem, and hence quantifying the noisy quantum channel from the physical model is an important problem.
We work with an explicit physical model -- a pair of initially decoupled quantum harmonic oscillators interacting with a spring-like coupling, where the bath oscillator is initially in a thermal-like state. In particular, we treat the completely positive and trace preserving map on the system as a quantum channel, and study the truncation of the channel by truncating its Kraus set. We thereby derive the matrix elements of the Choi-Jamiolkowski operator of the corresponding truncated channel, which are truncated transition amplitudes. Finally, we give a computable approximation for these truncated transition amplitudes with explicit error bounds, and perform a case study of the oscillators in the off-resonant and weakly-coupled regime numerically.
In the context of truncated noisy channels, we revisit the notion of approximate error correction of finite dimension codes. We derive a computationally simple lower bound on the worst case entanglement fidelity of a quantum code, when the truncated recovery map of Leung et. al. is rescaled. As an application, we apply our bound to construct a family of multi-error correcting amplitude damping codes that are permutation-invariant. This demonstrates an explicit example where the specific structure of the noisy channel allows code design out of the stabilizer formalism via purely algebraic means.
We study lower bounds on the quantum capacity of adversarial channels, where we restrict the selection of quantum codes to the set of concatenated quantum codes.
The adversarial channel is a quantum channel where an adversary corrupts a fixed fraction of qudits sent across a quantum channel in the most malicious way possible. The best known rates of communicating over adversarial channels are given by the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) bound, that is known to be attainable with random quantum codes. We generalize the classical result of Thommesen to the quantum case, thereby demonstrating the existence of concatenated quantum codes that can asymptotically attain the quantum GV bound. The outer codes are quantum generalized Reed-Solomon codes, and the inner codes are random independently chosen stabilizer codes, where the rates of the inner and outer codes lie in a specified feasible region.
We next study upper bounds on the quantum capacity of some low dimension quantum channels.
The quantum capacity of a quantum channel is the maximum rate at which quantum information can be transmitted reliably across it, given arbitrarily many uses of it. While it is known that random quantum codes can be used to attain the quantum capacity, the quantum capacity of many classes of channels is undetermined, even for channels of low input and output dimension. For example, depolarizing channels are
important quantum channels, but do not have tight numerical bounds.
We obtain upper bounds on the quantum capacity of some unital and non-unital channels
-- two-qubit Pauli channels, two-qubit depolarizing channels, two-qubit locally symmetric channels,
shifted qubit depolarizing channels, and shifted two-qubit Pauli channels --
using the coherent information of some degradable channels. We use the notion
of twirling quantum channels, and Smith and Smolin's method of constructing
degradable extensions of quantum channels extensively. The degradable channels we
introduce, study and use are two-qubit amplitude damping channels. Exploiting the
notion of covariant quantum channels, we give sufficient conditions for the quantum
capacity of a degradable channel to be the optimal value of a concave program with
linear constraints, and show that our two-qubit degradable amplitude damping channels have this property.

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